Big profit driving efforts to cut warming gases

Foreign companies pay a price set in a European-based market in carbon dioxide emissions which is high because the waste gas has a far more powerful effect on global warming than carbon dioxide emissions. So the companies must pay a premium far beyond the cost of the actual cleanup. Such efforts are being watched in the United States as an alternative more politically attractive than imposing taxes on fossil fuels like coal and oil that emit global-warming gases when burned.

But critics of the fast-growing programme, through which European and Japanese companies are paying roughly 3 billion for credits this year, complain that it mostly enriches a few bankers, consultants and factory owners.

With so much money flowing to a few particularly lucrative cleanup deals, the danger is that they will distract attention from the broader effort to curb global warming gases. As word of deals like this has spread, everyone involved in the nascent business is searching for such potential jackpots in developing countries.

A study commissioned by the world organisation has found that the profits are enormous in destroying trifluoromethane, or HFC-23, a very potent greenhouse gas. Countries in sub-Saharan Africa, which were originally envisioned as big beneficiaries of emissions trading, are receiving almost nothing. Just four nations8212; China, India, Brazil and South Korea8212; are collecting four-fifths of the payments. under the programme, with China alone collecting almost half.

Two-thirds of the payments are going to projects to eliminate HFC-23.

8212;KEITH BRADSHER